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Topic: 7.2.x stuff (Read 10649 times)

wowhead has a rundown of the artifact weapon changes in 7.2, based on what is up on the PTR. The basic idea is:

* You get up to 35 traits in your weapon or more (one rank in the bonus trait), if you haven't already* You go through a quest line to unlock weapon version 2.0* All points you spent in the bonus trait after rank 1 are refunded, and your bonus trait goes back to rank 1* You get access to five new traits in a linear order. The first of these gives you the power bonus from rank 20 of the old bonus trait, minus the power bonus from rank 1. (So for DPS specs for instance, you get +10% damage and +25% stamina.)* The last of the new traits has twenty ranks, and is the new AP sink.

If you have all 20 points in your bonus trait going into 7.2, you'll be able to buy about three of the new traits with the refunded points, as I understand it. Artifact knowledge will go up to 40 and the trait costs are balanced with that in mind, so they go up pretty steeply.

Preliminary notes on flying in 7.2 are on wowhead: http://www.wowhead.com/broken-isles-pathfinder-flying-guide. Looks like we have more grinding ahead of us. Scroll down about 1/3 of the page for the new material... or start from the beginning if you don't have Broken Isles Pathfinder, Part One yet.

That's not so bad. Essentially it's just a continuation of the story and order hall campaigns; seems like you'll finish those just by doing whatever content they unlock along the way. The real headline that you've buried here is that we get new mounts for completing the achievement. Which is exciting except that the mage mount is stupid and I hate it.

Suppose I have 35 traits in all three of my artifact specs. Is it better to put all new AP into my favorite spec, enjoy the slight improvements as they come along, and then spend the refund for the 36th+ points when 7.2 comes? Or, since 36+ will be purchased with a different kind of points, should I just sell those AP items for gold now?

Points you invest in your pre-upgraded weapon will not be wasted. Someone who goes into 7.2 with a 54 weapon traits will, after upgrading, be a few traits ahead of someone who goes into 7.2 with only 35 traits.

However, new ranks of AK will steadily devalue current AP in playtime equivalent, while the increasing costs of traits will devalue current AP in purchasing power. For the time you spend acquiring AP now, you'll get sixteen times as much when you reach AK 40 a few months after 7.2 launches.

So the consequences of vendoring all of your AP tokens now would be:

* Right now you won't get the small power bonuses (which do add up, even if they aren't a lot per rank).

* When 7.2 launches you'll likely be 1-3 traits behind what you would have if you had acquired the AP.

At 5 days a point that is another 45 days before you are earning AP at a nice rate compared with what you need

I've been thinking about this a bit. One the one hand, I think Blizzard doesn't want people with rank 54 weapons to be hugely far ahead of people with rank 35 weapons, even though they will get 60 million or so AP refunded to them when they empower their weapons. That's probably why the trait cost zooms up to 15 million right away (a major increase over 1.6 million for trait 35 or even 4.6 million for the pre-empower trait 54). On the other hand, Andius is right; grinding out traits at 20+ million apiece will feel pretty bad for the first few weeks.

One possible extra variable is that patch 7.2 content could--total speculation here--reward more base AP than we are used to getting now, so that even at AK 25 we're getting more than the 50-100K doses of AP we're used to getting right now. I looked in wowhead's PTR database for AP items introduced in 7.2 to see if that bears out, but they've created new versions of every existing AP item (because they don't want banked AP items to work on empowered artifacts), so it's very hard to see what's really new.

At 5 days a point that is another 45 days before you are earning AP at a nice rate compared with what you need

I've been thinking about this a bit. One the one hand, I think Blizzard doesn't want people with rank 54 weapons to be hugely far ahead of people with rank 35 weapons, even though they will get 60 million or so AP refunded to them when they empower their weapons. That's probably why the trait cost zooms up to 15 million right away (a major increase over 1.6 million for trait 35 or even 4.6 million for the pre-empower trait 54). On the other hand, Andius is right; grinding out traits at 20+ million apiece will feel pretty bad for the first few weeks.

One possible extra variable is that patch 7.2 content could--total speculation here--reward more base AP than we are used to getting now, so that even at AK 25 we're getting more than the 50-100K doses of AP we're used to getting right now. I looked in wowhead's PTR database for AP items introduced in 7.2 to see if that bears out, but they've created new versions of every existing AP item (because they don't want banked AP items to work on empowered artifacts), so it's very hard to see what's really new.

The big question for me about the new levels of Artifact Knowledge is how quickly you can learn the new levels I assumed 5 days a level but have not been able to find any information on this.For alts does the Artifact Research Compendium also increase with the new Artifact Knowledge levels?

It turns out the numbers we were looking at for AP costs and AK were preliminary and will change significantly in next week's PTR builds.

More interestingly, Ion wrote a long post about the goals of AP, how it turned out in 7.1.x, and how they will address it in 7.2. Basically, don't expect to be able to completely max out your weapon in 7.2 like some of us are starting to do in 7.1, but do expect players to be closer to each other in weapon power.

Obvious tuning, etc, etc, etc. ...however for rogues the 2-piece is a reduction of a CD on an ability that basically was always up when I needed it, so mild DPS increase on multi-target fights at best, and a 20% damage boost on my 4th/5th most damaging ability compared to the current set which is a 30% boost to my 2nd biggest damage ability.

I could maybe see them making things like set bonuses and legendaries less powerful so there is less stress among players when doing the haves/have not thing....but it starts to swing to make this stuff less exciting. It's a tricky thing to balance since the more exciting a drop is, the more stressful it is when you don't have it.

I feel like set pieces are more okay with this though since you can LFR for them and spend bonus rolls specifically to try to get them whereas legendaries it's pure wishful thinking. Also I always find it fun when a set bonus changes how I play my class a bit or brings out certain talents/abilities you might otherwise pass on.

...but again. Judging this based on the VERY first piece of information is probably quite silly.

Yeah - the bear one seemed similarly underwhelming. The feral one is also targetting our number 5-ish melee ability.

I do really also appreciate sets now being 6 pieces where you can choose 4. It does make me wonder if we are going to end up in the place for some specs where the optimal gearing is 4T of one tier + 2T of the other tier (like back in the BC days, where ferals wore 2T4+4T6). Though I suppose legendaries possibly interfere with that.

Legendaries a great idea but they way you get them it not well thought out with the drop rate subject to /RND, the "bad luck" protection as weak that it people ask is it in yet it is clearly not working. Also the items when from super awesome to well it has lots of stats on it, they did balance this but rather than buff the worse up they nerfed the best and buffed the worse. Which while fair made legendaries while great items less than legendary.

Just thinking about it a better way would have been if ever thing you do that could have dropped a legendary would drop a token instead. Have a npc sell a item which when used gives you a legendary ( abit like the items from the timeless isle). If you want a particular legendary then you can buy that one but the cost of it is a lot more than just to a random one. This way you could see the progress you make towards your legendary and if one was "best" or you wanted a particular one you could if you wished say up for it.

I think the idea of it being 4 out of 6 is so you could wear 2 legendaries and still get you 4 piece bonus. There are a lot of pieces you could get to make the mixed set work seeing you have 8 none set slots to work with.

Artifact Power has been a hot topic lately, both around the community and within the development team. With Patch 7.2 on the horizon, introducing both new artifact traits and additional Knowledge levels, we have been reflecting on the way the system has unfolded during the first months of Legion, and evaluating changes based on the lessons we have learned thus far.

First off, a look back at where we started.

From the outset, Artifact Power was intended to serve two intertwined purposes: First, it offered max-level progression that was not entirely item-driven, along with choices and elements of character customization as players traversed their trait trees; second, it was meant to serve as a universally desired, consistent reward from all types of content.

In crafting the systems that delivered Artifact Power, we weighed the merits of hard caps versus a smoother system of diminishing returns. We had extensive experience with hard caps, through multiple past iterations of currencies like Valor Points and Conquest Points, and wanted to avoid several of the downsides of that approach. For example, a cap inherently feels like more of an expected quota, where missing a week or falling short of the cap puts you clearly, and potentially permanently, behind the curve.

Instead, as everyone knows, we settled on an open-ended system of diminishing returns. Without any hard caps on how quickly players could earn AP, it was essential to have some sort of limiting mechanism on the gap in power between players of different playstyles, and different levels of time investment. We accepted the admittedly complex design of Artifact Knowledge because it solved this problem, effectively reining in the size of this power gap. Players trying to progress past the expected artifact level for their Knowledge would run into those rapidly diminishing returns, while those who played less than that would have Knowledge as an accelerator to help them catch up to the cutting edge. When Emerald Nightmare was new content, while the average raider was at 20 or 21 points, the most dedicated might have been at 24 or 25 – a relatively modest gap.

Now, where things went wrong…

We feel that we made two major missteps with the Artifact Power system that increasingly manifested themselves as we got deeper into Patch 7.1 and 7.1.5. And both of them served to undermine that core goal of ensuring that the gap between players with different levels of time invested into the system could not grow too large.

First, the cost of ranks in the 20-point final trait remained relatively flat, as opposed to the rapid exponential scaling up to that point. This meant that someone who spent twice as much time gathering AP as I did would have roughly twice as many ranks as me. Instead of the 24 vs. 21 gaps we saw in Nightmare, a number of hardcore raiders entered Nighthold with 54 points, while others were just beginning that final progression and found themselves with nearly 10% less health and damage, equivalent to being almost a full tier of gear behind. Players who switched specs or characters along the way found themselves in a similar position. The power gap was larger than ever before, which created a sense of obligation and a number of negative social pressures that the system had previously tried to minimize. In short: We’re not at all happy with how this worked out.

A common suggestion is to simply reduce the amount of Artifact Power required to fully unlock the artifact in 7.2. This would not solve the underlying problem, but would rather reduce its duration while heightening its intensity, as competitive players sprinted to finish their Artifacts in order to be “ready.” But then we would inevitably tune around that completed power level, and other players would simply be playing catch-up the entire time. And in the long run, Artifact Power would not be serving its intended purpose of ongoing parallel progression. A capped-artifact player who goes a week without getting any item upgrades ends the week literally no stronger than before. Part of the value of the artifact, both for personal progression and guild progression, lies in ensuring that everyone is at least a bit stronger next week than they are right now, and a bit closer to overcoming whatever obstacle stands in their path. Our goal is for Artifact Power to always be of some interest as a reward, whether from a World Quest, or as a consolation prize when failing a bonus roll.

Instead, we are focusing on fixing the mistake of flat cost scaling at the end of the progression, and instead keeping the increases exponential throughout, while also strengthening Artifact Knowledge as a core pacing and catch-up mechanism. These changes should be visible in an upcoming PTR build.

This is done with the primary goal of reducing the power gap based on time investment, while preserving Artifact Power as an endgame reward that everyone values. If the leaders in Artifact Power were only a few points ahead of a more typical player, rather than crossing the finish line when most were just leaving the starting blocks, players with less time to commit would not be as disadvantaged in competitive activities. If a Warlock were choosing between having 48 points in a single spec or 44 points in all three specs if they’d split their efforts evenly, the barrier to playing multiple specs would be significantly reduced. We are still tuning the curve for 7.2 trait costs, but we’re currently targeting scaling such that someone who earns twice as much AP as me will have an artifact that’s only ~1.5% stronger; someone who earns four times as much AP as me should only be 3% stronger. On the whole, this should be a massive reduction in the power gaps we see in the live game today.

The second problem with our initial implementation was that repeatable sources of Artifact Power (Mythic Keystone dungeons in particular) dominated time-limited sources such as Emissary caches and raid bosses. The fact that a large portion of the community evaluates their Artifact Power needs using “Maw runs” as the unit of measurement is ample evidence of this failure. We very recently deployed a hotfix to increase AP earned from Nighthold in order to make raiding, with a weekly-lockout, better compare in efficiency to repeated Mythic Keystone runs. And in 7.2, we’re more thoroughly addressing this issue by adding a significant amount of AP to the weekly Mythic Keystone cache, while somewhat reducing (and normalizing based on instance length) the AP awarded by repeated runs. These changes are being made to narrow the gap in AP earning, and thus power, based on time investment.

All of the above changes are aimed at allowing players the freedom and flexibility to decide how they want to spend their time, and which goals they wish to pursue, while limiting the difference in power between players who arrive at different answers to those questions.

Sounds to me like more grind and if you are not running atleast one Mythic keystone a week then you are doing it wrong.